Endings

 Recently I've been thinking about, and discussing with an online friend, great endings in literature – those passages that close a book with something that resonates long after, that can stir the heart and, in some cases, start the tears. A prime example is the ending of Lolita – or rather its two endings. There is the shattering paragraph that closes Humbert's narrative, the point at which he finally becomes fully aware of what he has done to Lolita, as he stands on a hillside above a playground and hears the childish sounds rising from it (as Nabokov himself did on one of his American butterfly-hunting trips) – 

'What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.'

And then, as if that is not enough, there is the closing passage of Humbert's confession and of the novel: 

'I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my spectre shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. [Clare Quilty]. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.  I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.'

Perhaps the most beautiful of all endings is that of James Joyce's 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy, at the end of an awkward and dispiriting social evening, has discovered his wife convulsed with tears as she remembers an earlier love in her life, a young man long dead...

'Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hordes of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling. 
   A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey [his wife's dead love] lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

Still with Joyce, the ending of Ulysses, concluding Molly Bloom's great inner monologue, is an astonishing passage (and, like the story of lost love in 'The Dead', owes a great deal to the much maligned Nora Barnacle, without whom Molly Bloom would never have come into being) – 

'the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leap year like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman's body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn't answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn't know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governor's house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.'

Phew. After which, let's descend to something completely different – the ending of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Here Yorick has been obliged to share a room with an attractive Piedmontese lady, who has an equally pretty maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety, Yorick find himself restless and unable to sleep, and exclaims 'O my God!' –  

' – You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME

  I think I might return to this subject, as I have quite a few more notable endings up my sleeve...